MONTREAL – As Quebec prepares for an election campaign expected to be launched next Wednesday, the easy assumption would be that Jean Charest’s days are numbered. After more than nine years in power, his Liberal Party is battered by scandal, and even the Premier’s staunchest supporters admit he remains largely unloved by Quebecers.

But Mr. Charest has made a career out of defying expectations, combining a thick skin with a knack for identifying adversaries’ soft spots. The political graveyard that was supposedly his destination countless times has instead filled with the opposition leaders who took him on. With the latest polls showing the Liberals in the middle of a three-way race, he may have one more trick in store.

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As Mr. Charest appeared this week at one of the flurry of government announcements signaling an imminent election call, a reporter asked whether August was not more suited to vacationing than politics.

“When you’re doing what you love, it’s not really work,” he replied.

Since arriving on the provincial scene from Ottawa in 1998, Mr. Charest’s love for his role has not always been apparent. He was drafted from his job as leader of the federal Progressive Conservatives with a mission to defeat Parti Québécois leader Lucien Bouchard and stamp out the separatist threat. But despite winning a greater share of the popular vote, the Liberals lost the election. It did not take long for Mr. Charest to go from golden boy to whipping boy.

A June 2000 cover of the newsmagazine L’actualité showed a laughing Mr. Charest with the headline, “Why is this man smiling?” Inside, the “portrait of an unloved one” recounted the grumblings among Liberal insiders and Quebec’s business elite about Mr. Charest’s performance as opposition leader. The author said Mr. Charest often looks unhappy on the evening newscast: “His scowling face and big sad eyes betray him.” An unnamed former Liberal minister was quoted saying that the Liberal leader “should have followed his instincts and never come to provincial politics.”

But Mr. Charest hung tough, and after Mr. Bouchard’s surprise resignation in 2001, it was the PQ that was in a shambles. In April 2003, the Liberals defeated the PQ under Bernard Landry.

His nine years in power — two majority mandates with a 20-month minority sandwiched in between — have rarely been smooth. From the beginning his project to “re-engineer” Quebec and slash the size of government met with vocal resistance and he was forced to scale back his project significantly. The government seemed prone to missteps, with topics ranging from religious school funding to the privatization of a public ski resort blowing up in its face. It is during the current mandate, however, that the Liberals have been repeatedly under fire for issues of integrity. Former Liberal justice minister Marc Bellemare claimed that during his one-year tenure, judicial appointments were essentially up for sale to Liberal supporters, prompting Mr. Charest to create an inquiry in 2010 led by retired Supreme Court justice Michel Bastarache. Mr. Bastarache concluded the specific influence-peddling allegations were unfounded, but he heard enough evidence of political interference to recommend the correction of “significant deficiencies” in the appointment process.

Allegations of favoritism even extended to the awarding of permits for daycare spaces. A report last year by the provincial auditor-general found that in the latest wave of expansion of the subsidized daycare network, one-fifth of the permits awarded by the Liberal government went to operators who had not passed muster with the bureaucrats evaluating proposals.

More damaging have been the stream of revelations about collusion and corruption in the province’s construction industry, frequently tied to provincial government contracts. Mr. Charest repeatedly dismissed calls for an inquiry into the allegations before finally relenting last year. Public hearings have just begun, but already former anti-collusion investigator Jacques Duchesneau has testified that a “clandestine empire” of collusion is costing taxpayers hundreds of millions of dollars. He also alleged that Quebec political parties run on “dirty money” provided by firms sniffing for government contracts.

It is no secret that a major motivation for an unusual summer election (the vote is expected for Sept. 4, the day after Labour Day) is to get to the polls before the commission, headed by Superior Court Justice France Charbonneau, resumes sitting Sept. 17, and more embarrassing information emerges.

The other factor pushing Mr. Charest forward is the crisis over his government’s tuition hikes. The springtime student protests were supported by PQ leader Pauline Marois but opposed by a significant majority of the public, and Mr. Charest’s strong stand against the student demands increased Liberal support. He can be expected to regularly paint Ms. Marois, as he did this week, as an accomplice of the striking students and the “chaos” they engendered.

Still, Quebec voters rarely grant premiers a third mandate, let alone a fourth. The last premier to win four elections in a row was Maurice Duplessis in 1956, and a Léger Marketing poll last month found 69% of respondents were not satisfied with the Charest government. If anyone were to ask today, as L’actualité did 12 years ago, why is Mr. Charest smiling, the answer would be that even though things seem bad, they have been much worse.

Monique Jérôme-Forget, a finance minister under Mr. Charest who retired in 2009, said she is not surprised that Mr. Charest is still standing and ready to embark on another campaign.

“He is probably the most courageous and determined man I have seen in my life,” she said. “We think that he is going through a difficult period now, but I have seen Jean Charest several years ago where he was at 15% support, 16%, 14%, 11%. It wasn’t pretty, and it affected him a lot.”

She is puzzled by Mr. Charest’s failure to click with Quebecers. “He is not a Premier who has generated affection,” she said. “I don’t understand, because he is a very warm man, very attentive to others.”

If he has again proven wrong those who predicted that he would step aside as leader before the next election, it is because he is “motivated to defend his record and defend what he believes in,” Ms. Jérôme-Forget said. “It is clear that he has Quebec at heart, just like he has Canada at heart.”

Mario Dumont, former leader of the Action Démocratique du Québec, has a more cynical view of Mr. Charest’s election plans.

“After three mandates he knows a loss is possible,” Mr. Dumont said. “We can agree it’s a lot more honourable to lose saying, ‘I increased tuition fees, it was a question of conviction, it had to be done because it was responsible thing to do for university financing, but the people did not want it and I was beaten as a result.’ It’s a lot better than saying, ‘I was kicked out of office because there was wall-to-wall corruption.’ ”

Mr. Dumont, who this fall will begin hosting a public-affairs show for the TVA network, acknowledged that Mr. Charest’s political skills can be deadly.

“Look at all the opposition leaders who went up against him and have had to put an end to their careers: Bernard Landry, André Boisclair, me. He has really developed a specialty, not personal attacks but sustained attacks,” he said. Mr. Dumont was branded as a weathervane blowing any direction public opinion pushed him. Mr. Boisclair, who had admitted using cocaine as a young cabinet minister, was labelled as “lacking judgment.” Currently Mr. Charest is trying to associate Ms. Marois with the red square she wore throughout the spring in support of the student movement, saying she stands for the street and a sovereignty referendum.

“When his advisers tell him, ‘You have to attack a particular point,’ he is really effective. He is an attack machine,” Mr. Dumont said.

Despite having undergone those attacks, Mr. Boisclair today considers Mr. Charest a “great gentleman” and praises his toughness. “There is obviously no love affair between him and Quebecers, but he got re-elected twice, and he’s still there. That says a lot about his resilience.”

He said Mr. Charest has to have exceptional social skills to have survived so long. “If he didn’t have these skills, his caucus would have killed him years ago,” he said.

Veteran La Presse reporter Denis Lessard wrote this month that half of Mr. Charest’s cabinet and even more of his caucus would prefer waiting until next spring for an election. But Mr. Charest calls the shots, and all signs indicate he will not wait. If he should win, it would not be his first death-defying act but certainly the most spectacular.

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